Trending topics are a popular on-line feature on many content publisher's websites, with captions such as: “Trending Now,” “Now Trending,” “Hot Topics,” “What's Trending” and others. Trending topics provide a list (usually just ten items) of the currently popular topics in several categories such as news, entertainment, sports, finance, and just about any other topic of interest to web users. Trending topics generally appear in a prominent position on a content publisher's home page as hyperlinks, making it easy for a user to identify what is “trending” now. The user can then click on one of the listed topic to view informative content for that topic. The trending topics are based on web user's current interests, as derived from multiple data sources, such as search engines, social media sites, blogs, and other sources.
Referring now to the drawings and to FIG. 1 in particular, there is shown an example of a current “Trending Now” module 110 on a content publisher's home page (http://www.yahoo.com) 100. The “Trending Now” module features popular topics in news (finance, sports, celebrities, medicine), movies, books, consumer products, and many others. These trends are curated for the publisher's region and/or content consumers. For example, an entertainment site would not feature re-financing trends. The trending topics are a compilation of what interests the publisher's consumers. In some cases, such as in the case of a search engine such as Yahoo!®, the consumers are the general web population. Although the trending topics can be localized by region, and tailored to a publisher's consumers, they are not specific to an individual user.
Previous innovations are centered around ideas which consider trending search terms as having higher than normal frequency of ‘search’/‘use’ for a topic (United States Patent Publication Number 2012/0271829 “System and Methods for Hot Topic Identification and Metadata,” filed Apr. 25, 2011). A plurality of categories have also been identified based on the intersection of categories viewed by the user and the categories available via the system (U.S. Pat. No. 8,370,348, “Magazine Edition Recommendations,” filed Dec. 6, 2011). However, none of the existing innovations provide trending topics customized for a user.
Therefore, there is a need for a method to enrich the user's on-line experience with customized trending topics.